Oliver Building is nearing full occupancy with law-firm lease

The Henry W. Oliver Building, one of downtown Pittsburgh’s classic office addresses, is nearly fully leased and back from the brink of default of a few years ago.

With a new Embassy Suites under construction in the building’s upper floors, McKnight Realty Partners has leased the last full floor available in the 25-foor, 471,000 square foot building to the law firm of Sherrard German & Kelly.

“For all intents and purposes, it’s pretty darned leased,” said Izzy Rudolph, a property manager at McKnight, putting the office vacancy of the building at around 85 percent or 90 percent, with the vacancy largely coming in quarter- and half-floors.

It’s a big turn around from where the building was a few years ago. Its long history that dates back to its construction in 1910.

But after losing K&L Gates, the building became the city’s largest building to be turned over to a special servicing company for being at risk to default on its commercial mortgage-backed security of $29.8 million.

As the hotel construction continues, the building has remained attractive to law firms, despite K&L Gates moving on.

According to a quarterly report by the Pittsburgh office of CBRE, which also represented the firm, Sherrard German & Kelly, the firm took about 23,000 square feet in the building.

The Oliver building is also the headquarters of Meyer, Unkovic & Scott LLC, Metz Lewis Brodman Must O’Keefe and others.

Tom MacDonald, a senior managing director for Newmark Grubb Knight Frank, said the distinctive design of the building is attractive for law firms.

“The capital E shape of the floors for that building lends itself to having a lot of windowed offices. It’s much easier to give each person who has a private office a private window,” he said. “You don’t see any new buildings being designed that way today.”

Rudolph credits the building’s new tenants for helping to turn the building around.

"We’ve always known it was an architectural gem and that it had the potential,” he said. “It’s really the tenants that have come in that you have to give them credit for the imagination that they had.”